Tag: creation

Breathing Through the Knothole

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Her elbow rested here
a century ago.
This is the field

she looked upon,
a mad rush of wheat
anchored to the barn.

What her thoughts were,
the words she penned
are driven into the grain,

its deep tide crossing
under my hand. She breathes
through the knothole.

Outside, the wind
pushes the farm
down an ally of stars.
~Wyatt Townley, “The Oak Desk” from The Afterlives of Trees

J.R.Tolkien’s writing desk at the Wade Center at Wheaton College
Ears of Wheat – Van Gogh museum

A writing desk is simply a repurposed tree; the smoothly sanded surface of swirling grain and knotholes nourish and produce words and stories rather than leaves and fruit.

I can easily lose myself in the wood and wondering about its origins, whether it is as I sit at a window composing, or whether I’m outside walking among the trees which are merely potential writing desks in the raw.

Museums often feature the writing desks of the famous and I’ve seen a few over the years – it is thrilling to be able touch the wood they touched as they wrote – to gaze at the same grain patterns and knotholes they saw as the words gelled, and feel the worn spots where their elbows rested.

Though my little desk won’t ever become a museum piece, nor will my words be long-remembered, I am grateful for the tree that gave me this place to sit each morning, breathing deeply, praying that when I sit here, I might bear and share worthy fruit.

A Feather on the Bright Sky

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N.Scott Momaday passed into eternity last week at age 89.

On the first day I took his class on Native American Mythology and Lore in 1974 at Stanford, a tall, young N.Scott Momaday strolled to the front, wrote the 60 words of an Emily Dickinson poem “Further in Summer”on the blackboard. He told us we would spend at least a week working out the meaning of what he considered the greatest poem written — this in a class devoted to Native American writing and oral tradition. In his resonant bass, he read the poem to us many times, rolling the words around his mouth as if to extract their sweetness. This man of the plains, a member of the Kiowa tribe, loved this poem put together by a New England recluse poet — someone as culturally distant from him and his people as possible.

But grace works to unite us, no matter our differences, and Scott knew this as he led us, mostly white students, through the poem. What on the surface appears a paean to late summer insect droning – doomed to extinction by the desolation of oncoming winter – is a statement of the transcendence of man beyond our understanding of nature and the world in which we, its creatures, find ourselves. As summer begins its descent into the dark death of winter, we, unlike cicadas and crickets, become all too aware we too are descending. There is no one as lonely as an individual facing their mortality and no one as lonely as a poet facing the empty page, in search of words to describe the sacrament of sacrifice and perishing.

Yet the written Word is not silent; the Word brings Grace unlike any other, even when the summer, pathetic and transient as it is, is gone. The Word brings Grace, like no other, to pathetic and transient man who will emerge transformed.

There is no furrow on the glow. There is no need to plow and seed our salvaged souls, already lovingly planted by our Creator God, yielding a fruited plain.

Scott was one of my most remarkable and influential teachers, teaching me to trust memories, to use the best words, and to describe beauty as best I can. I know his words will forever live on.

…<Dickinson’s Further in Summer is> one of the great poems of American literature. The statement of the poem is profound; it remarks the absolute separation between man and nature at a precise moment in time.  The poet looks as far as she can into the natural world, but what she sees at last is her isolation from that world.  She perceives, that is, the limits of her own perception. But that, we reason, is enough. This poem of just more than sixty words comprehends the human condition in relation to the universe:

“So gradual the Grace
A pensive Custom it becomes
Enlarging Loneliness.“

But this is a divine loneliness, the loneliness of a species evolved far beyond all others. The poem bespeaks a state of grace. In its precision, perception and eloquence it establishes the place of words within that state.  Words are indivisible with the highest realization of human being.
~N.Scott Momaday from The Man Made of Words

The Whole Dream

A Little Shriveled at the Top

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O lovely apple!
beautifully and completely
                 rotten
hardly a contour marred–

                 perhaps a little
shrivelled at the top but that
                 aside perfect
in every detail! O lovely

                 apple! what a
deep and suffusing brown
                 mantles that
unspoiled surface! No one

                 has moved you
since I placed you on the porch
                 rail a month ago
to ripen.

                 No one. No one!
~William Carlos Williams “Perfection”

When a newspaper posed the question, “What’s Wrong with the World?” the Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton reputedly wrote a brief letter in response:

“Dear Sirs:
I am.
Sincerely Yours,
G. K. Chesterton.“

That is the attitude of someone who has grasped the message of Jesus.
~Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God 

I am what’s wrong with the world and so are you.

Not one of us escapes the rottenness that lies not-so-deep beneath our shiny surface.  We are full of wormholes, inviting the worms of the world to eat us alive.

One look at the news headlines of the day is enough mar the most perfect surface. No one moves to save us from our over-ripening fate; we sit untouched, withering and shriveling.

We are the problem and the problem is us.

We need rescue by a Savior who is the one good apple among a barrel of contagiously bad apples. We are so tainted, it takes Someone who truly is Perfect to transform us from the inside out, from worm-holes back to wholeness and on to holiness.

May we fall to our knees, grateful, that Christ, who is the Leader of all in His Kingdom, will grant us a grace and sanctuary and perfection we emphatically don’t deserve.

May He retrieve us before the worms (or the hornets) do. We are in this together.

We have met the enemy and he is us.
~Walt Kelly (in the words of Pogo)

Insculped and Embossed

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What heart could have thought you?—
Past our devisal
(O filigree petal!)
Fashioned so purely,
Fragilely, surely,
From what Paradisal
Imagineless metal,
Too costly for cost?
Who hammered you, wrought you,
From argentine vapour?—

“God was my shaper.
Passing surmisal,
He hammered, He wrought me,
From curled silver vapour,
To lust of His mind;—
Thou could’st not have thought me!
So purely, so palely,
Tinily, surely,
Mightily, frailly,
Insculped and embossed,
With His hammer of wind,
And His graver of frost.“
~Francis Thompson “To a Snowflake”

photo by Alexay Kljatov, pbs.org
photo by Alexay Kljatov, pbs.org

I wish one
could press snowflakes
in a book
like flowers.
~James Schuyler from “February 13, 1975” in Collected Poems

Each snowflake falls alone, settling in together to create sculptures in communal effort. And each is created as a singular masterpiece itself.

We too, as the created, are like each snowflake. Together we change the world, sometimes for better, too often for worse. But each of us have come from heaven uniquely designed and purposed, preciously shaped, hammered, wrought and preserved for eternity through God’s loving sacrifice.

Without God embossed on our surface, we would melt into oblivion between the pages of history.

Joining in their Applause

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Let other mornings honor the miraculous.
Eternity has festivals enough.
This is the feast of our mortality,
The most mundane and human holiday.

The new year always brings us what we want
Simply by bringing us along—to see
A calendar with every day uncrossed,
A field of snow without a single footprint.
~Dana Gioia, “New Year’s” from Interrogations at Noon

… we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves.  And that’s all we need
To start.  That’s everything we require to keep going. 

Look back only for as long as you must,
Then go forward into the history you will make.

Be good, then better.  Write books.  Cure disease.
Make us proud.  Make yourself proud.

And those who came before you?  When you hear thunder,
Hear it as their applause.
~Albert Rios from “A House Called Tomorrow”

Let us step outside for a moment
As the sun breaks through clouds
And shines on wet new fallen snow,
And breathe the new air.
So much has died that had to die this year.

Let us step outside for a moment.
It is all there
Only we have been slow to arrive
At a way of seeing it.
Unless the gentle inherit the earth
There will be no earth.
~May Sarton from “New Year Poem”

photo by Nate Gibson

Always a night from old to new!
Night and the healing balm of sleep!
Each morn is New Year’s morn come true,
Morn of a festival to keep.
All nights are sacred nights to make
Confession and resolve and prayer;
All days are sacred days to wake
New gladness in the sunny air.
Only a night from old to new;
Only a sleep from night to morn.
The new is but the old come true;
Each sunrise sees a new year born.
~Helen Hunt Jackson from “New Year’s Morning”

I awake glad this New Year’s morning,
breathing deeply of each day’s fresh start,
aglow and glistening in the light of a soft sunrise.

Dawn is our Creator’s gift to us,
a time to renew and refresh,
to be reminded of the history behind us
and humbled by the unknown ahead.

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.
Isaiah 55:12

Let us join their applause…

The Sunrise Shall Visit Us: An Inward Light

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…yea, thou art now
Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother,
Thou hast light in dark, and shutt’st in little room
Immensity, cloister’d in thy dear womb.
~John Donne from “Annunciation”

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,
Christ, the true, the only Light,
Sun of Righteousness, arise,
Triumph o’er the shades of night;
Dayspring from on high, be near;
Day-star, in my heart appear.

Dark and cheerless is the morn
Unaccompanied by Thee;
Joyless is the day’s return
Till Thy mercy’s beams I see;
Till they inward light impart,
Glad my eyes, and warm my heart.

Visit then this soul of mine,
Pierce the gloom of sin and grief;
Fill me, Radiancy divine,
Scatter all my unbelief;
More and more Thyself display,
Shining to the perfect day.
~Charles Wesley “Christ, whose glory fills the skies”

It seems impossible that God could be contained within a womb. The Creator, who made the heavens, went inward into His vast universe of atoms and sub-atomic particles. He hosted tiny cellular nuclei within His body, instead of the heaven-flung massive nebulae in distant galaxies.

And He chose to do this. Out of His love and goodness, He became Light in the darkest space of the human body, to be birthed to illuminate a world bent on destruction.

From radiance to ribosomes,
from cosmos to cytoplasm,
from galaxies to Golgi apparatus,
from moons to mitochondria,
from utter darkness to “let there be light.”

And there is Light.
God is there, coming from above and coming from within.

NASA photo of a nebula

Advent 2023 theme
…because of the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high 
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song

Advent 2023 theme
…because of the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high 
to give light to those who sit in darkness
and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.
Luke 1: 78-79 from Zechariah’s Song

Moments Out of Sight

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A neighborhood.
At dusk.

Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.

Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.

Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.
~Eavan Boland “This Moment” from In a Time of Violence

Photo by William Albert Allard
photo by Nate Gibson

At times, particularly at night, I’m keenly aware of all the unknowable and uncountable lives happening behind closed doors and curtained windows, each one living their own sacred moment in time.

So many meals being eaten, baths taken, tears shed, stories told, prayers recited, kisses shared.

These moments are the blessings of a quotidian predictability that we try to pass on to our children. In our routines, we may become oblivious to the mysteries happening all around us: innumerable stars shining, fragile moths fluttering and sweetening apples hanging heavy — yet there is mystery within each of us as well.

In the dark of night, despite our weariness:
We are remarkably loved and loving.
We try our best in difficult times and circumstances.
We grieve losses while struggling to survive sorrows.
We seek purpose and meaning, despite feeling unworthy.

Each passing moment becomes one to cherish.
Each moment mysteriously holy and sweet.

Blinking in the Sun

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And I have traveled along the contours
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool,
I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.
~Arthur Sze, from “The Shapes of Leaves” from The Redshifting Web: Poems.



…when it has been centuries
since you watched the sun set
or the rain fall, and the clouds,
drifting overhead, pass as flat
as anything on a postcard;
when, in the midst of these
everyday nightmares, you
understand that you could
wake up,
you could turn
and go back
to the last thing you
remember doing
with your whole heart:
that passionate kiss,
the brilliant drop of love
rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,
then you wake,
you stumble from your cave,
blinking in the sun,
naming every shadow
as it slips.
~Joyce Sutphen from “From Out the Cave”

Just like an autumn leaf, the skin on the back of my hand has a branching network of veins, like so many tributaries in a river delta. This connection between human circulation and a chlorophyll-driven photosynthesis factory suggests a mysteriously organized origin. We, formed as living breathing creatures, journey to our ultimate destination back to dust.

Together we emerge from the shadows, blinking at the bright sun, thriving under its light.

Maybe “turning over a new leaf” is for people like me who seem to be overly attracted to old leaves. For the moment, I travel along each falling leaf’s edge, in love with their colors and flaws and gradual fading transparency.

Our Creator God falls in love with each one of us for all the same reasons. He created us to live and breathe and flash brilliant in our journey, our veins flowing with gratitude for His Word and World.

If I Choose to Fly…

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If I had a yellow breast, I would perch in high shadows.
And in my dreams, if I had to fly, I would fly quickly

because if I shone, the tabby on the ground would
not be fooled. He knows these trees do not flower.

Above me, bark rains down. And as his lifting paw
reaches me I sense Don’t move. And I don’t. 
~Lola Haskins “Goldfinch” from Homelight

The bird flying up at the windowpane
aspired to the blue sky reflected in it
but learned the hard truth and flew off again.
Was it a finch, a blue tit or a linnet?
I couldn’t quite identify the strain.

Checking a pocket guide to get it right
(The Birds of lreland, illustrated text)
I note the precise graphic work and definite
descriptions there, and yet I’m still perplexed.
I only glimpsed the bird in busy flight:

a bit like a goldfinch, like the captive one
perched on a rail, by Rembrandt’s young disciple,
except for the colouring, blue, yellow and green.
A tit so, one of those from the bird table
who whirr at hanging nuts and grain.

Off he flew. Now there’s a mist out there
and a mist in here that wouldn’t interest him
since what he wants is sky and open air.
He’s in the trees; I’m trying one more time
to find an opening in the stratosphere.
~Derek Mahon “At the Window”

In this world full of predators and prey,
even perching high on a tree branch,
motionless as a leaf or a bird-like blossom,
is risking a sharp-eyed hunter’s detection.

Or flying, oblivious, head-long into an enticing
reflection of blue sky might take me down

– any move I make could be my last –

So perhaps the moves I make,
whether subtle or grand,
must mean more than simply avoiding
being eaten by the eater.

Instead, I move with grace and purpose
to forage to feed my young,
to offer a bit of flashing gold to a gray landscape,
or fly with abandon because it is exactly
what my wings are created to do –

even when I’m aware hungry whiskers twitch below…

“handkerchief” tree in Northern Ireland

Breathing on the Window

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Dark mornings staying dark
longer, another autumn

come, and the body one
day poorer yet,

from restless sleep I wake
early now to note

how the pale disk of moon
caves to its own defeat,

cold as yesterday’s fish
left over in the pan,

or miserly as a sliver
of dried soap in a dish.

Oh for a sparkling froth
of cloud, a little heat

from the sun! I shiver
at the window where I plant

one perfect moon-round breath,
as I liked to do as a girl

against the filthy glass
of the yellow school bus

laboring up the hill,
not thinking what I meant

but passionate, as if
I were kissing my own life.
~Mary Jo Salter “Moon-Breath” from The Surveyors

At times, I’m amazed at the heat of my own breath.
Forming a cloudy mist on a cold day,
a round fog on the mirror or window,
a warming of ungloved fingers.

This breath that I was given at my beginning
is a gift I rarely think about,
a gift I take for granted.

Nightly, as the moon honors the sun,
reflecting its glory like a faint echo,
I treasure the heat and heart
of that first gift of breath so long ago.

Soli deo Gloria.